


one by one

by Anecdoche (so_psychso)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ants, Body Horror, M/M, Paranoia, The Corruption Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), jordan pov
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29752302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/so_psychso/pseuds/Anecdoche
Summary: Jordan has been seeing things. Hearing things. Feeling things. Another set of eyes, though, is always beneficial.
Relationships: Jordan Kennedy/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	one by one

**Author's Note:**

> was going through my docs and found this little tucked-away gem, there's more in the latter end of the wip i'd like to polish up (and iirc, things were gonna veer towards a more M/E raiting) but I just though i'd throw this out here for the Jordan Kennedy nation <3

He doesn’t want to go back. Hell, he didn’t want to go in the first place, but what would he have told his supervisor when that call came in? When thousands upon thousands of silver, wriggling bodies sought building and body alike for their hive, for their home, because the woman that had long ago marked him out for someone doomed no longer sufficed, and they needed more, ate more, burrowed _more_ … What the fuck are you supposed to do in a situation like that?

So he’d gone along, and he’d burned and poisoned and sprayed, and scrambled with the toughest of his workmates for CO2 when they finally got one of the poor sods from the Archives conscious enough to scream about fire extinguishers.

Even then, he hadn’t known what he was up against, what would inevitably drag him back to this place of hollowed out horror. That would take some time, when the burning proved a simple enough remedy for a body that could never again be a home, and even longer still, because memory has a way of mutilating itself, all coddled up in denial. 

His nose stung for days, then weeks, then, at last, three nights ago, he’d bolted awake, embalmed in the humidity of too warm an evening for October, and all of the pieces fell together in his swimming head. Soggy, rotten, bloated jigsaw bits, but time and trauma had ultimately done little to warp the edges, and it fit like skin that isn’t yours, but dammit if you can’t make a go at it.

And he knew he had to go back.

So he did. And he talked to the man with so much of eyes and pleading in his voice, each inflection lacquered over by fear so rich as to almost be blood in the back of Jordan’s throat, but he gave his statement, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in that place, and he left, hoping that—yes _that_ —would finally be the end of it.

But it hasn’t been. Because everything’s gotten so much worse, and now he has to go back. Again.

He doesn’t even know what he’s trying to achieve, lurking there on the street opposite the Institute. At present, he succeeds in cutting as innocuous a figure as any bystander, several employees darting in and out of the stately glass entrance doors without sparing him a second glance. Maybe it’s because he did well to don his old bomber and tatty jeans—lord knows he’s sick to death of the clinical _swish-scratch_ of his ECDC uniform, always slightly too tight at the biceps and too short at the trouser leg. 

Or maybe, and most likely, no one remembers the poor, terrified exterminator who dove head first into that sea of flesh and infection, and he’s wasting his bloody time playing at this nonsense when he should be marching his way to the Archives so he can demand to know what the fuck is happening to him.

So he can beg, _please_ , why does everything feel like it’s crawling? Blood along his veins, skin against bone, nightmares through his throat when he wakes up screaming, drowning in a brine of ants that just isn’t _there_. 

Except it is. They are. _They_ are everywhere, all the time—he’s set out so many traps, and though no bodies remain, the bait is always gone by morning—and he still catches whiffs of that scouring, cloying scent, all sick and sweet and pungent, putrefying up his nose till his eyes stream and he has to go flush them in the loo for ten minutes, because he can’t exactly use any of the designated stations at work now can he? What would his mates think? What could he possibly tell them that would sate either party of their curiosity and his suffering? What would they do to him, if they found out how sick he was?

And then there’s the face that watches him, that implacable visage of indifference behind closed eyes. It was the last one he pulled from the worms, in fact, and neither expression wavers from the other, the face as brutally serene in sleep as it was when Jordan dragged him free of those suffocating parasites. 

So… so it has to be connected. There are reasons, there are facts, and there is a solution.

Or, there will be, if he ever musters the damn courage to cross the street and actually confront… what was his name again? Joe? Jacob? Surely not Jordan, that would be entirely too ridiculous, and he laughs—actually _laughs_ —for the first time in ages, a private ray of mirth in this looming fog of latent fear and exhaustion he’s been wending less and less easily of late.

He sobers up when the skin of his inner left wrist twinges, and he digs his nails in without a second thought, chasing the vermin that do not scuttle beneath his marrow.

But they do, they _do_. Just because he can’t see them, doesn’t mean they’re not there.

Oddly, though, this isn’t the inciting incident that sends him scurrying for the shelter of the Institute. No, still wracked with indecision and disbelief, he remains stood and scratching at his wrist till it bleeds, then he decides to have a cigarette for the nerves that uncurl their feelers into the empty tunnels left in the wake of insects that are not there.

(They are.)

His hands hold steady as he bites the filter end of a roll up, and he’s halfway to his lips with the comforting glow of his lighter, when two figures, a mother and son, pass him by. 

They’re in no rush, and they hardly pay him any mind at all save a mumbled “Pardon,” from the mother, so Jordan takes an appropriate step back, flicking shut his lighter because he doesn’t want to be a bad example for the kid.

But then that kid starts humming, just a snatch of notes, a quick little refrain before he’s fully out of earshot. But Jordan heard him, and it dredges up inside him such dread that he feels he might be sick. 

_‘When Johnny comes marching home again,_

_Hurrah! Hurrah!’_

Only he knows it by another iteration, a nursery rhyme whose earworm very few could deny entry. Least of all him.

And if it doesn’t just _burrow_ right in.

He’s crossed the street in seconds, a force of decision not entirely his own, but instead his body spasming on autopilot. Fifteen feet to the doors. Open them. Get inside, get inside _now_. 

The lass who usually works the front desk—Ronni? Rose?—is nowhere to be found, so he keeps going, thundering deeper and deeper into the building, sifting through his half-lucid memories for the route to the Archives.

_‘And they all go marching down to the ground_

_To get out of the rain, boom, boom, boom.’_

It’s not raining, the only roar in his ears that of the damnable song and the careening scatter of his panicked thoughts, the singular need to _get inside, get in, get to the Archives, find the man who haunts your dreams and fills your screams with so very many ants. Find him, find him, find him—_

He does. Finds him right where he expected, in his stuffy office at the back of too long and dark and musty a room, flanked either side by towering wire shelves equal parts barren of and laden with boxes and pages and files. 

The door to that office, as Jordan comes to a panting halt at its threshold, is closed, but he knows the man behind it. Knows he’s _there_. You don’t hide that easily, and certainly not from somebody like Jordan Kennedy. 

To his extremely addled credit, he does employ marked restraint and civility as he opens the door, and the face that greets him is not the aloof visage of voyeuristic salivation, is not the benign lack of consciousness that makes even the determined gnawing of a parasite that much more endurable.

It is, by all accounts, the man, and he looks very, rather irritated, and honestly? Jordan’s not sure whether to laugh, to cry, or to start bloody singing.

Save… the song is gone. Not forgotten—he could never be so lucky, could he—it’s just… not there, not buzzing down the back of his throat, needling between his ears. Something else has taken its place, a distant murmur that slowly resolves itself to words. Which are coming from the man. Of course they are. They _always_ are.

“–alright? Mr. Kennedy? Can you–? Oh for heaven’s sake… 

“ _Jordan_. Jordan Kennedy?”

Jordan blinks, and then startles, because the man—Jon? Yes that’s it, _Jon_ —because Jon has gotten right up in his face, staring him through with those fishhook eyes. That’s how Jordan first thought of them anyway, eyes that beckoned and gouged and beached him on the shore of his own narrative, and have since left him, struggling for air, full of putrid things that come to the scent of a corpse and now want only to finish the job of him, whole.

“Yes,” is what he says in response; it’s rude not to answer, and he was asked something of a question.

“Good Lord,” Jon breathes, sagging in a relieved stoop, one hand to his chest, the other reaching blindly back for the edge of his desk.

“I–sorry,” Jordan stammers out, hardly mollified of his initial terror, but more than that, he feels immensely foolish for his conduct. It’s not enough to forestall his aggrievements from tumbling between his lips, an ineloquent rush of surely asinine excuses that leave him woozy and cotton-mouthed.

“I need to talk,” he starts, “with you. I mean, about you? And–and Prentiss, and Amherst.”

Again, sans his volition, Jordan moves, bridging the distance between himself and Jon in two, trembling strides, till he’s well beyond the formality of personal space, but Jon doesn’t do anything about it, doesn’t flinch or shrink away, just slowly meets Jordan’s eyes with an impregnable expression that makes Jordan think maybe, just maybe, he’s not so alone in this mania. Insofar as he can be alone anymore. The crawling things make company whether he likes it or not. And he does _not._

And that’s why he’s here, back in this wretched place staring down another broken man who doesn’t dare to look through him, no matter how many holes Jordan thinks he _knows_ he sees when he catches his reflection off guard. 

“I–” Jordan starts, and the moment is rife for something, a grand expulsion of horror, all neatly compiled the same as it slid from his teeth when he gave his first account.

But Jon hasn’t asked him the right way, some sort of preamble is missing. Linchpins and all that.

So Jordan waits for Jon to perform his dues. Surely he feels it, too, surely he can hear the ghosts of a melody and its thousand million little legs, its mandibles, all the frayed places it nibbles his sanity to shreds.

“Knock knock?”

They both freeze. 

“Sorry, didn’t mean to intrude,” there’s the squeal of the door’s hinges, “Martin just said he–oh.”

The presence at Jordan’s back feels horribly wrong, but when he breaks his gaze from Jon’s and turns, he sees that it’s only a woman stood there. 

“It’s fine, Sasha, Mr. Kennedy was just–”

“Giving a statement,” Jordan finishes, a tangibly discomfiting tension pulling taut between Jon and the woman, with him caught in the metaphysical crosshairs.

“Oh,” Sasha blinks at him.

“Right then,” she finishes, after several undue seconds of utter silence and staring behind horn rimmed glasses Jordan has the strangest suspicion she doesn’t actually need. “Apologies for interrupting, would you like me to have Martin make some tea?”

“No, that’s fine,” Jon says. “Thank you. Close the door on your way out, please?”

“Of course, Jon.”

The punctuating click of the latch neatly severs the abrupt oddity of Sasha’s presence, and Jordan returns his focus to Jon.

“Would you sit? Please?” This, Jon directs at his shoes, so Jordan doesn’t feel compelled to do so, not exactly, but it does supplant itself in his mind as the best damn idea in the world right about now.

So he sits, and Jon takes up his position behind his desk. He doesn’t sit, himself, instead bracing his palms on the desktop leaning upon them heavily, and Jordan takes quick stock of him like that, shoulders hunched and fingers twitching, stress oozing off of him in a brume of exasperation and exhaustion.

“Is she back.”

Jordan frowns, opens his mouth to request clarification, but Jon beats him to it, lifts his head, and _stares_ , eyes rimmed with what a less attuned man might mistake for tears. 

But Jordan knows fear when he sees it. He knows the haunted agony that perches in his own eyes when he gapes in his mirror at 3 am, frigid water dripping down his cheeks and chin, doing nothing to allay the images, or the gooseflesh. Or the smell. 

“No,” he says, little more than a rasp through a throat that feels already like glass. 

“This isn’t about her.”

“But you said–”

When Jordan gave his statement, he hadn’t quite gathered what to make of the Archivist, the man vacillating between stodgy academic and scared little boy with almost no discretion at all. There he was, cowering from the jar of ashes Jordan presented him, then in the same breath, Jordan had vomited every one of the vile, putrescent secrets he’d never confided to another living soul.

At present, Jon possesses nothing of poise, no uptight demeanor or clipped tone. But neither is he so naive as to think Jordan somehow means him harm, or lies, or whatever it is that stalks his paranoia. Simply, Jon is just a person pleading to another for answers, for reassurance. For some goddamn fucking _help._

Which… sort of answers the foremost of Jordan’s burning questions, itself seeming silly in retrospect, inasmuch as he’s allowed to feel anything beyond suffocating, swarming terror.

Jon doesn’t know about the dreams, and this leaves Jordan again with a choice. Pack it up and put on like he’s gone mad, or confide the awful things he knows to be the truth.

Ultimately, Jon makes the choice for him, leaning close, casting sideward glances as if Jordan’s somehow brought a spy in their midst. His voice, when next he speaks, drops several conspiratorial octaves, almost sibilant in its murmuring drone, drawing something heady and urgent from the depths of Jordan’s stomach, where nausea and adrenaline make merry into docile, stupefied obedience. 

“Why are you here.”

“Because I–I think it wants me,” says Jordan, a ratty exhale cleaving his lips like piano wire. 

“Because when I see you in my nightmares, I think you want that, too. I think you want to let it have me, just so you can see what happens.”

“Jordan,” the facade almost breaks at that, Jon’s terrible, reaching words wavering just a note, just enough, but too quickly he regathesr himself before Jordan can do anything save endure.

“What is _it._ ”

Once again, the reply flows like an oil slick.

“It’s–it’s everywhere, Jon. All the time. In my head, my skin, and they’re all over my flat, but only when I’m not looking. It’s–they… they’re loudest when you’re watching, but they never swallow me up, not enough to end it, and too much to get out. It’s what Jane talked about, what Amherst was, and I… I don’t think it’s going to let me go.”

The crashing of Jon’s chair upon the floor echoes secondary to the action, Jordan’s senses not quite working right as the haze that’s taken his tongue from his autonomy wrenches itself from his person, rears back as if struck.

“We need to leave,” hears Jordan, but he can’t seem to match the words with a mouth, because Jon’s out of sight, which means he’s not real, is now a crawling thing of invisible torment.

Is, in fact, still very much there, a reality Jordan reacquaints himself with, jolting and yelping as hands take him by the shoulders and push him from his chair.

“ _Now_ ,” says Jon.

Jordan obeys, stumbling in a semi circle to see Jon all but yanking his office door off its hinges, and he half expects that Sasha weirdo to be lurking on the other side, listening in. 

She’s not, of course she’s not, it’s only an empty archive, a long, dusky stretch of stationary and the supposition that there should accompany some scent of must or decay. But whatever climate control keeps this place dry works its miracle of filtration, and Jordan smells nothing save the earthen fever rising studiously to the underside of his skin.

He still keeps obeying, loping after Jon, kicked dog deference to the man he meant to accuse, to physically wring answers from if it came to it.

It still might, the last, razor keen bit of Jordan’s mind forcibly supplies that, but it hasn’t the upperhand, so Jordan keeps following Jon, because he has to know where this might lead. Follows him out of the archives, up the stairs, past—Rosalind’s?—desk, and back out into the real world, where cars and people and the background hum of the city can, for a moment, dispel the notion that he and Jon are anything but two people not defined by horrific and grotesque tragedy.

“You still smoke?”

Asked as if Jon isn’t already lit up and offering over a fag, and Jordan abruptly recalls he never did have that one earlier, so he accepts it graciously, to say nothing of how he lets linger his fingers against Jon’s, just to check. Just to be sure.

He isn’t, sure that is, but Jon _feels_ solid enough, no ripples beneath his skin, no twitching or tickling.

“Thanks.”

Jon makes no move to give his lighter, perhaps an oversight, or perhaps something more, but Jordan has his, so it’s a non-issue. Little blessings, and all that.

It’s only after he sucks his first, deep drag, that Jordan realizes they’re nowhere near the Institute, a block away, at least, and cloistered alone together in a bus stop, its broken screen scrolling nonsense streams of gibberish arrival times. That bears examining, certainly—he’s not prone to blackouts or memory loss—but a bigger part of him relishes the distance, so he chooses not to follow that train of thought. Jon’s his only quarry, besides, and Jordan has him. That’s all that matters, all that _can_ matter, because he’ll surely break under much more strain.

“So you’re having, what, nightmares? Visions?”

The words are derisive, but Jon’s tone is not, and Jordan watches the man’s hand shake as he pulls on his cigarette. 

“I don’t know what I’m having,” says Jordan. “But there are ants, and you’re there, and it’s so much more than just… fucking trauma.”

Jon says nothing to that, and they stand in reluctant silence, despising the expectant quiet, but loathing whatever else might be said in its stead.

Ultimately, Jon breaks it, which feels right in Jordan’s eyes, though no less abrupt and foreign, ambling through his ears and making his hands twitch to slap, smack, crush the words and watch them seep from their shattered serifs.

“Can you show me,” not a question.

“I don’t know,” the best answer he can give. 

A hand, then, not uncruel, but neither is it unkind, and it reaches out for him, his shoulder again, makes to be something reassuring in its grip, but it only gets Jordan’s skin juddering beneath the weight of too cold a palm.

“I think,” says Jon, either unaware of this awkward, itching burden he’s placed upon Jordan, or more simply, he doesn’t care. 

“I think I should see your flat.”

In his periphery, Jordan catches staring eyes, pleading things begging him to turn and meet them. He takes another drag of his cigarette.

“And what’ll that do?”

“I don’t know.” 

He doesn’t. Won’t. _Can’t_.

“But it can’t hurt, right? If you say you’re seeing things, if it’s the same as–as Prentiss, as the Hive–”

Jordan goes rigid, teeth grinding through ash and paper.

Head snapping sideways, he seethes at Jon, “I _never_ said it was the same.”

“N-no, I’m sorry–”

“I _will not_ become her,” Jordan interrupts, stalking in on Jon, boxing him against the far panel of grime streaked glass. “Whatever’s happening, I’m not going to let it, and neither are you”

Jon’s hands have gone up in surrender, a fact Jordan only parses as his own accusing finger—jabbed between Jon’s ribs—brushes their frigid skin, finds it still lacking of wriggling texture or humid fever or anything that isn’t stolid indifference.

Jon’s face, however, is anything but, his brow pinched, his eyes flittering, lips working around syllables that resolve themselves to smoke, only, because he’s still got his cigarette between them. Which is what makes Jordan pull back, abruptly aware he’s about to singe both their faces.

It’s all very… non sequitur, nothing of this endeavor lending itself to any kind of cohesion or productive result. He’s told Jon everything, and nothing, and still feels no closer to a conclusion.

“I’m not your enemy, Jordan.”

Jordan almost weeps at that, because nothing has ever sounded so honestly hollow.

He wavers a moment, gauging outcomes he can’t even foresee past the first frame.

“Then _help_ me.”

“I’ll try.”

That the hollowness feels good, Jordan can’t bear to remark on. Instead, he nods to himself, pulls deeply on his cigarette, then grinds the rest beneath his shoe before ducking out of the bus stop.

“Mine’s not far,” he says flatly as Jon follows suit, sullen and without question.

Where else could this start? The burned out haunt of Arthur Nolan? Amherst? That nauseous house with its febrile thousands? 

_We’re not the same,_ Jordan tells himself. This didn’t start immediately in his home, it began deeper, cut through his core, a sampling of self gone rotten, so it needs only to be cut out, cauterized, put in the bin. Medical waste and hazards, all the standard affair. He can do that. He can contend with _that_. Jon is just here for a buffer, to apply the know-how that Jordan lacks. That’s why he works at the Magnus Institute, and why Jordan works for the ECDC, and why, together, they’re as damn good a team as one could hope to have wielded against forces Jordan never wants to know the shape of.

Neither remarks on the obvious of Jordan’s previous and very adamant refusal of permitting Jon to see the state he’s let his flat lapse into. It’s best they don’t go poking holes in this, lest the careful ruse of scaffolding buckle completely on them both, and then how will Jordan claw his way to fresh air? No, best he drag Jon as far into this as the man’s willing, then hope like hell he can figure a way back out. 

And, if it isn’t his fate after all, maybe he’ll bring Jordan with him.


End file.
